The Promise of AI

That will happen, but not, not what she does. I mean, eventually it hits all of us, right? The ol Rigamortis. Old Rigamortis. Creepin in. That doesn't help.

Alright. Please, silence.

Welcome to the Marketing Team in One podcast, where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing teams face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. Now here's your hosts, Eric and Mike.

How's it going, Mike? How you doing? I, I gotta know what's going on here. Hat, sunglasses, Hawaiian shirt. Candy cigar. Yeah. These are, take the edge off man. These are working pretty good. I can't, I'm not going to smoke a real cigar, but. What's your flavor there? Cherry? Cherry? L Bubble. L Bubble. Yeah. Maybe we could get them as a sponsor, huh?

Um. Yeah. So, what's with the getup? Why, why are you dressed like this? Robots. AI. Fixes everything, man. They do everything. I don't have to do anything anymore. I mean, I'm going on vacation. Taking the rest of the week off. I'm out of here, man. So, AI's doing everything. So, replying to all your emails? Well, I mean I mean, they're completing designs for you?

No, no. And then writing copy for things? Yes. Final copy? You just send it off? Final? No, not final copy. So, AI is doing all these things without your intervention whatsoever, and you can go on vacation.

Okay. I guess I'm canceling my vacation then. Sorry to interrupt. Sorry to cancel, you know. Ruined the dream. Is it But they promised, you know. That's what everybody promises. The, the promise of AI. It's gonna make work obsolete. I won't have to do anything. Just robots. Do it all. Right? I mean, that's what, that's where they're headed, right?

That's what they keep saying, right? I think that's where things are headed, right? Everyone's talking about how it's going to, you know, make life easier. We're going to be able to cut out everything, but that's really not the reality now. Who knows? It might get there, but as so this is an evolving conversation, right?

I think that's what we said before we began was like, this is probably the first of many AI conversations we have. Yeah. Um, this is really just state of the union as of, you know, mid 2024, I guess, if we have a date on it, because things are going to be changing all the time and we'll probably want to check back in.

Oh yeah. And talk about this. Yeah, and get more, we probably could get a lot more specific about different tools and things that we've, we've seen work, but you know, the reality is that none, none of us are going on vacation and letting AI do our, do our work. No, we're so far away from that at this point.

It's yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of great promise and I'm sure that, you know, there's certain parts of certain jobs that run into being maybe threatened by AI. But I think when it comes down to it, if human beings are providing value for their organizations or companies, then they're not going to be replaced.

I mean, I think that that's a general, um, You know, there's a lot of things that can be automated for sure. And that's, what's going to make life easier for people, but it's not going to automate everything. All the intricacies of doing the things is, is still very, there's parts of it that are automated.

Yes. They've been automated for a while. It's not a new thing. Yeah. Um, I think the generative AI stuff is where people get really excited and, you know, Get out over their skis on hopes and dreams of what that stuff can do. But I, I, from, I don't know about you, but I've not seen anything that I would send off to a client on a generative AI, whether it's words or images.

What is your, what are you? Oh gosh. Yeah. I mean, I think there's a huge role for, um, in this AI world to have a level of discernment on what you're looking at and where who's. Who's going to be receiving that and how they're going to receive it. Right. And the best way I've seen is if you spend any time in Reddit boards, right, and somebody is trying to be helpful and you, in the Reddit board, but you can tell they just asked chat GPT the answer and they pasted in there.

Everyone on that Reddit board. is finally attuned to what AI wrote. And it's, it's people's AR rate, AI radar is really up. And I think there will be a lot of people who don't have any discernment there. They're just trying to check a box and they're going to get that stuff done. But I, It's a quality thing.

And I don't, I don't think that AI has got to the point, maybe someday it will be, but I don't think AI has got to the quality angle right now and that we as humans need to be more attuned to that and, and know that there will be a place for us with the robots helping us make But it's never going to be completely replaced.

It's never going to respond to your emails. In a very nuanced way, which email especially is very delicate. Yeah, it's never gonna, like design wise and um, image wise, I mean, I think in one offs, you could probably do pretty good, but like, um, If you're in charge of a brand and you want a consistent look and feel, I know the tools will probably, um, Expand and become a little bit more consistent on everything, but I don't know.

From, for someone who doesn't have a lot of, hasn't spent a lot of time really like trying to like hone that craft. It's not. It's not something you just run to the AI and put in something and you're going to get something. It takes a lot of You gotta have the eye. You gotta have the ear. You gotta know, have the experience to know what's good and coming out of it.

And in fact, I think AI even at this point has a style to it, especially visually. Like, I can immediately see posts on social media that are, Oh, somebody just went into mid journey. Boom, there's the same lighting, the same nuanced elevated look and feel to things that, you know, as a trained professional, we're like, bingo, that's not real, you know, it's something smells funny.

Yeah, for sure. And the copy too, there's a language, there's a formality that I think comes even as you try to train the models with your own custom training within Chad, GPT, which is, you know, a whole other thing, it still produces Content that is not you can sniff it out. It's a little too like what you can tell that's not human produced in a way Back to the dream of Vacation lands, you know, I don't think that's I don't think it's reality yet.

It might be fun Yeah, but I I'm I'm more optimistic that you know an example. I like to use all the time is that Fax machines are still a thing Some people still use fax machines now I was Telling people that they should dump fax machines 15, 20 years ago. When was the last time we got a fax? I'm trying to think, I mean, not even a junk fax like that.

I don't even get junk faxes. I remember those. Oh my God. Yeah. They finally realized that there's nobody that like it took, took way longer than it should have for them to realize that that was stupid. Um, but I mean, there's, I think, so there's going to be a large portion of people that just won't, they're going to be.

kicking and screaming their way. A lot of businesses are going to be kicking. They're screaming. I know a lot of businesses that still do think a lot of things on paper. Everything's a paper thing, right? You're not going to just like change their mind on AI and on those things. It's not, you know, like, I think that if you spend most of your day at a computer or on a screen and you're absorbing marketing news, design news, tech news, the picture that's painted of AI, it can, I think it might be overblown.

And so I don't know what the future holds. Nobody truly does. But, um, I, I have reason for optimism that it's not just gonna, you know, create this, um, world where robots are doing everything and we're on a beach. So, at, uh, where we're at with AI and the tools right now, I mean, there is a wide range of AI tools.

Tools that are optimized for doing everything from video editing to creating avatars that speak and do fake videos, which if you've seen those, there's this, you know, you can tell it's not a human being talking. A very few of them are very good. And the ones that are good are very expensive and still not that great.

I mean, there's that uncanny Valley uncanny Valley that people just pick up on immediately with that stuff. So that's almost seems. Disingenuous in a sense too. It's like, Oh, I'm not even worth like a real human talking to me. So there's, yeah, there's everything. There's such a mix of all types of tools that are built around AI and marketing.

What do you think, what have you seen that is really some of the more helpful things that are ready for prime time? And at what level do you incorporate those into marketing at this point? It is a big list, I know, but there's a general bunch of categories. I'll start by just saying stuff like research, you know.

ChatGPT, you can throw an Excel file in there and it'll type out a paragraph or a sentence describing a lot of the details that you might want to learn about that. You can throw in, have it go out and search. Now there's a tool called Perplexity that goes out on the internet and does research for you and can do a little bit of that.

I would say a general. Idea I have in my head around AI right now is that it gets you 60 to 70 percent of the way there, which is a lot. That's a lot of work, but there's that 30%, 40 percent even that you need human eyes and analysis around some of that stuff. Um, but that, that's one of the things that I know when we're working with web, web clients, part of our initial process is to go through and do an analysis and look at the landscape.

And there, there's a part where, you know, the robots could go start doing that scraping and automate some of that stuff and then produce it back to us where we can come in and analyze that and present that to a client. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I mean, I don't think I've dove fully into one. to try and get really good at it when it comes to AI tools.

Mm hmm. They've been kind of spread pretty wide on things. My, my things now are, I think that using AI tools like ChatGPT to help with it's replaced a search engine for a lot of things, a ton of things, right? Like it's been invaluable in that way. Um, I, my thing is I found is like, I'm always wanting more out of it.

And I think So I will do a little things like I think getting to 60 percent is in my usage is kind of idealistic when it comes to creating things that I want other people to see I think I, you know, I see it more like that 30 40 percent it's helping me kickstart. The blank page thing phenomenon. It's a huge, it's a huge thing to get something on a page to be able to react to and, um, and, and edit and everything.

But I haven't found anything that that's got me, you know, over halfway there yet without. Going in and doing the work to tune things. That's the secret. And that's where all the time is spent for people who, that I've seen and, and I'm trying to learn a lot about it to see, you know, What it can do. I think that it does everybody as service, including our clients.

It helps them to us produce better, better stuff for them. Um, and save money. I mean, it does save money and it is an efficient tool to use. And that's where I think everybody gets so excited about it. But the funny thing is, is a lot of those like demo videos that I watch, Oh, you can automate this and automate that.

They show all the automations that take place in it. And then they get to the part where they have to, and then you train the model to speak like you do. And they just say, I copy and paste this out of a Word doc I already did. Okay, that could take you months to figure out those specific pieces of information that you need to do to train your model to sound like or emulate what you are.

Or a lot of focused time on this. And I think what I've, what I've noticed is the, my, me not being able to go in deep. to do these training things. It's not from my, I know it exists. I know those things exist. I know it's somewhat possible. Um, It's sometimes it's just focused because there's so many other things that need to get done.

Is it really, can I take all this time to try and train, uh, custom instructions or do, do I have the time to understand and learn what it means to be a more of a prompt engineer and get those things and then look at the output of it and then say, Oh, this is pretty darn good. Oh, let me go back and test it again.

You have to have this very, iterative mindset and be able to keep coming back to that. But like if you're, if you've got a full plate of things to try and work on, that seems like a huge luxury. And that's why you see prompt engineering as a job now. And it is highly paid because they know that at the end of the day, if they produce something that's viable and it matches and everybody's happy with it, you've, you've saved, you know, tons and tons of time and resources.

So, yeah, but. That's not an easy thing. I mean, that's why those people get paid a lot of money because it's a hard skill to refine and to just do it is ridiculous. That just isn't, uh, I mean, and then like, I mean, from a practical example, I was writing copy for the email that we're, we send out to everybody who signed up for notifications.

Thank you all. Thank you. And it's a little summary of, uh, the podcast episode, right? And so we, we do, we've used AI, we feed that in there and we get the AI spits out. It's synopsis of everything. It's long, it's boring and everything. And I could spend. you know, an hour trying to tune the AI model to try and get me a, a thing for the, yeah, for the one small sentence, or I did the same, you know, it took me a half hour.

I wrote something fun in that I felt was more unique to us. And so I don't, I don't see how AI could have replaced that. Yeah. It's, you put an emphasis on the funny little bits when you do those descriptions and that's, how do you tell an AI to put hierarchy on the goofiness? Because it's a lot of that is the unpredictability of it, that you can't tell AI to be unpredictable with that kind of content creation.

I don't think. Yeah. And so I, like, it's those little things that I, that give me hope and optimism that there's always going to be a place for the people who can think critically about this. And I think it's a, it's a matchmaking thing. What are you, what are you putting out there into the world and what are, what is the world trying to get from it?

Um, I just, I see it all the time in email now. A lot of. Emails I get that are automated. Mm-Hmm. , you know, sequences of cold emails that are all written by ai. You can sniff it out in two seconds. Yep. And I don't, and I think it's just the beginning. I think it's gonna get worse. Oh definitely. I think until that becomes the zeitgeist of, oh, that's ai and it has that, you know, stigma.

Yeah. I guess if it, and it's recognizable, that will become a stigma. I know that, you know. I talked to some young people who are threatened big time about AI and it's nothing that's happening today. It's where they're going to be in 10 years that they're most afraid of. And they look at now some people supporting AI and doing all their work in AI is just going to hurt, you know, generations in the future in a sense.

I think so that's a real concern. And I understand that. And we want to speak to that a little bit as much as possible and kind of reassure people that we are a long ways off from getting to. anything that becomes that threat. And maybe it is a time to step in. And like, I know that there's a lot of people talking about putting limitations on AI and what it can do.

I don't know how the nuances of trying to figure out that problem. I don't. Yeah, that's a, there's other podcasts that are going to set you straight there. But I mean, like, I think there is, I think there's like, I think it's cautious optimism is my, my sense of everything right now, at least for the near term that, um, The reality is, I think there are things that will be replaced a lot quicker than everything.

Like if you're, I think in your role, if you're just, if you're sitting there and waiting for a bunch of instructions to implement, Right. To a T, that's where I'd be more worried, right? Like, or can you take those, or are you taking those instructions and thinking critically about it and then thinking outside of those instructions, what, what's helped shape those instructions?

Is it like, almost being contrarian about it a little bit. Like I think that contrarian, contrarian nature in receiving that, that's when we talk about like adding value to the company and stuff like that, it's critical thinking. It's, it's thinking about its place and how it got here. And if you can, the, to learn how to use an AI to do that, and hey, AI think for me critically about these things and these angles that.

It might be possible. I think there are a lot of like problem solving kind of like instructions you can give, but you have to learn how to do all those things and everything. I think it's building up that critical thinking skills and, um, the discernment that I talk about, the like quality, the, and everything.

If you have those eyes, and build that and tune yourself, right. Train yourself on that. Yeah. That's, I don't see that are, that's going to be a lot harder to replace. I think that's a really good point is that that's what the great promise of AI, I think for me brings out is that it's going to elevate the, the critical thinkers, the smart people with initiative.

Enforce that and reward that more and more and more because the, the stories that I've seen in these preliminary stories and the AI, and the funny thing is that we're on the, we're on the frontier of generative AI, AI has been around for a long time and automations. When you consider what some people call AI, it's really automations and those have been around forever, like especially in marketing.

There's so many automations with email and landing pages and inbound and all the different strategies that we use. Those don't really, that hasn't really changed much. It's really with the generative AI stuff that everybody's all getting all worried about it. And again, it gets to that point of the horror stories.

I lost my job to AI or whatever it is. Some of those, when I listened to them or watch them, um, you know, like you said, there were, they were order takers. They weren't thinking. They were just doing something that, oh, now there's an automation for it. Yeah. And so that job was already at risk. So not saying that to, you know, put fear in people, but just, you know, think critically, add value, and you will be in good shape.

Yeah. I think that's, that's kind of where I'm, my approach to it. Yeah. I think the other, the little angle is just a personal connection. Yeah. That's never going to be a real place too. So if you can, if you can build relationships with people and coworkers and everything, and you can hammer out some of these things through conversation, I think that's the, if you're going to sit in a cubicle and not talk to anybody all day.

Yeah. That's another kind of thing. But I mean, these are kind of, I feel like we're going down a rabbit hole of worry, but like, what about, I mean, why should we be optimistic about it? Like, like, I feel like there's been correlations to this shift before, right? Like the industrial revolution going back to that, right?

Like, yeah, that's way back when. Right. But like, I don't know. I feel like there's reasons for, like, not to have such a gloomy outlook on things. Yeah, I mean, technology's changed forever. It's just, especially if you're in a field that relies heavily on technology or there's a technological focus on that, you should be used to change happening all the time.

That's kind of what you signed on for, even in our business. You know, I think back, I started doing graphic design and illustration before computers, and Then yeah, that was there was a time then that happened. Well, I think maybe it was just a fever dream But we're talking, you know, this was 40 some years ago.

This was a while back and I was there I was a young designer when all of a sudden we got rid of the drafting table and a computer was sat down in front of you and you had to Put the X Acto blade away and the waxer and the next thing you know you're typing and you're using a mouse and that was a really tough few years of just translating those hands, you know, handwork skills over to your computer was not, uh, an instant thing that happened.

Same problem. Talk to printers, talk to production people, talk to all kinds of different people. And, uh, You would talk to those people and they saw the computer and there were firms that didn't want to have them and they weren't going to adopt it because it would just ruin the whole craft of design.

Same story. Same, you know, chicken little problems there that proclaimed that it would be the end of the world. There would be five designers in the world and they could do everything because they had computers now and all this stuff. Well, what really happened with it was, yes, there was a learning curve and there was an adaptation that had to take place, but at the end of it, design was elevated to something now that business appreciated because we became so much faster and better and so much more effective at what we did.

Business finally took a notice of it in the late nineties and said, wait, design is what. You know, an apple was probably part of driving this, you know, design driven Bay business type thing. Um, But I think it was, it helped accelerate it by the fact that we all had to convert over and do more work and be able to express ourselves in so many other ways.

And then the internet came along and we had even more channels to express our ways. So, all these expansions are frightening if you don't change and are not critically thinking about things. But the reality of it is, is at the end of it, we're all human beings that want to benefit. For the benefit of all of ourselves in a sense, and we're going to figure out ways to make things even bigger and better.

And I think that that's, I'm using that as an example as I'm not worried about AI because I went through a transition already way back and came out and did better than I ever imagined. So I remember. When the iPhone, before the iPhone came out, this is 06, when the rumors of the iPhone were everywhere, rampant.

Everybody was excited about it, but they didn't have any details. They didn't understand it. We didn't have touch screen technology to that level. I mean, we had some rudimentary version of it, but we didn't have touch screen. So nobody had that concept of just touching your phone and moving things around and doing things on it.

And it was funny to hear a lot of people who were big fans of BlackBerry, You remember the BlackBerry and they were called BlackBerrys because it was like little keyboards that you had your fingers on and there was little buttons and it felt like a little BlackBerry and that's what they were. They were crazy, crazy popular with business everywhere.

You could get an email on it. It was insane. I can't believe it. So people were, they called them CrackBerrys because they were addicted to them being on their BlackBerry. And I remember the criticism of, oh, nobody is going to want to just type on a screen. You need the keyboard to give you the feedback and do all the things and all the critics came out about it.

And it was just like, okay, guess like I, you know, and here we are the, there's a movie. Have you seen the Blackberry movie? No, there's a movie. There's a movie about the whole thing. And, uh, It's, it's, it's interesting. It charts the whole growth and fall. And they, they talk about, they show that moment where everybody at Blackberry is watching Steve Jobs talk about the iPhone and a bunch of the engineers kind of like, kind of see the benefit of that.

But the founder is so, um, fixated on the click. Oh boy. And then they, they, how basically Apple coming up with that and the, Knee jerk reaction of BlackBerry to go back on a lot of their Morals that they had as a company like they never before the iPhone came out. They never built any BlackBerry's outside of Canada Wow, they never outsourced to India or China or anything and then because of that because Apple put that out And this is from a dramatization of this.

Please don't fact check all this stuff. This is my recollection of the movie. Okay, whoa. But they outsourced this new touch screen that if you remember, they had a click feel to it. So when you would touch the screen, it still kind of clicked and everything. They, um, And because of speed and trying to get to market quicker, they outsourced the, um, the building of all those things to China.

And it, um, they, I think it was a staggering number is this is like the crawl at the end of the movie. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, spoiler alert, but Blackberry didn't exit, didn't keep going. Um, they had, they had returns and, um, bugs about like almost every single unit had to be, um, I wonder if you can get those on eBay.

That'd be pretty cool to get something like that. Just to see what that story, I forget. It was called, it was a hot, hot mess. You could tell they were just struggling, but, um, it's like the triangular iPad that the, that came out with on the, i, on the, on the office . That thing was at the, the belt. You could carry it around with you.

Yeah. It was awesome. But yeah, I think that, um, I think there's always gonna be. To the point of all this, right? There's always going to be the holdouts like, hey, this is the way it was. This is what people want, you know, and, um, I don't know, that goes back to the cautious optimism, the cautious part of it, because I think there, that there will be some changes, like even, even in the, um, Well, let's talk about another thing that's happened in our professional lifetime, right?

Photography. Oh, again. Yeah. Right. So photography, I was, you know, when I came up as, you know, in design, I was in this weird zone. We did almost everything on computers, but we still did have the holdout. So I, when you talk about using wax, I actually know how that was applied. It doesn't seem like some weird thing that you would apply to your keyboard.

So your fingers since I have a new phone respect for, you know, Mike. Okay. But like photography that a little bit later that shift from analog to digital and everything right like and I actually helped some photographers Like because I had the the computer knowledge I helped that help kind of shepherd feels like a weird overblown word to use but helped helped like show like hey Here's how some Photoshop works.

Here's here's how how to deal with digital files. Here's how to work on these things um There was a long time where people refused to go digital. Yeah. Right? And, but I think eventually the people who held out as long as they could, they either quit, moved into something else or they embraced the new reality.

Well, and there's that dynamic that also happens much like with vinyl records where there's the, the curve basically nosedives into the ground and then there's a few. Keeping it going. Yeah. 30 people in the world still have a film camera and I'm, I'm, I'm teasing. I'm sure there's quite a bit more popular than that, but I'm getting it.

The point I'm making is that it's on an upsurge. And I think that the film camera and analog and cassette tapes and vinyl and all that stuff, there's still space for it in the marketplace. And, but it's a much more specialized niche. There's space for cassette tapes. I just read an article about how popular cassette tapes are becoming.

That is the most contrarian thing you could do. I don't see any benefit to going back to tapes. The tape part of things, and I guess there's an audio element that people appreciate with the kind of the wobbly sound with it, but they're making new Walkmans. Not Sony, but it's other companies. There's a couple of companies that they will, it looks like it's, of course, it's got a touchscreen on the front.

Where you can, it's like an iPad, but you do actually can install a cassette. And there's musicians now releasing music on cassette. Really? Yeah. Are these all doomsday prepper people too? Yeah. That's the Venn diagram is tightly overlapped here. That blows my mind. Well, I get vinyl. There is an audio quality because there is that warmth you don't get on the digital.

But you can, but you can like skip around like, like fast forwarding. And rewinding and flipping. Remember when you could fast forward and hold down the play and like, listen to the gap in the song and then stop it really quick? Like, you'd tear up your tape that way. Don't do this at home unless you want to destroy your tape.

It's like, oh gosh. Sorry, that, that just, that's a, I know that's a rabbit hole, but that really. I think you're just trying to make life difficult for yourself at that point. Some people like to stop and smell the roses, I guess, and maybe that's one of those examples of, hey, let's slow it down. I don't need to just click whatever streaming service and then instant gratification.

Maybe I do want to click the cassette out, flip it over, put it back in, listen to Side B, you know? I don't know. Maybe there's some charm to that. I'm done with it. I threw away my tape collection like, I don't know, 15 years ago and I had probably 3, 000 tapes. So I was looking at it just trying to see if you grew like horns or uh, or something like, or an alien.

Started to look, I don't know. I just, that seems so foreign to me. The distinction between what we're talking about on cassettes and film usage and all these like retreads back. is no professionals are using those things. These are hobby things. These are very niche things. Professionals aren't going to go all credit to your friend's band.

They are not pursuing scale. No at all. They don't work at Salesforce. That's my guess

I'm just trying to brainstorm band names though of like an in house Salesforce band that like Yeah, we got like what would it be a name of a Salesforce band like a group of people who are so They love everything about Salesforce. They want to have their own It's like there's a CRM, CR Monster, C, C Overly complicated and expensive.

That's my band name. That's their first album. That's their first album, yeah.

Sales above all else. Those are all album titles, not band names. The band names need to be a little tighter. As a guy who likes technology, I do There's a lot of parts of that I think are really cool. Um, but I think the big thing I just keep a lot of things I keep coming back to is if, is this idea that you have to, it's a whole new skill set that you have to clear out time to get the results that you want.

And if you are, if you care about quality, you're going to have to spend a lot of time, a lot more time. Yeah. Trying to get something close in, you know, I. I, I use it every day. I use chat GPT every day, but I'm not, there's a lot of stuff that goes from what chat GPT gets me and what's gets delivered for others to use.

There's a huge gap there. Yes. And so that gap will close over time. I'd like to think it'll never. Completely close. I think that, yeah, I mean, chat GPT is perfect. That's the one that I'm using a lot. And then I also use perplexity all the time too, because I think the production of the, the resources that perplexity can do when you do search through it, it's just so much more effective than any other search engine out there, but getting back to the generative stuff around chat GPT, I do use it, but I use, I I'll write out a whole thing and then if I'm stuck on These two sentences don't work together.

I'll copy and paste them, throw it in chat, GPT, fix this. Boom. They spit it out. It's pretty close. I'll pop it back in. But a majority of what's in there is not, it's more just, again, let's like engineering a problem for me than it is like, just make it up. You know, do this for me, do this whole thing for me.

Yeah, it doesn't have the vision and I don't have the time, like you said, or a resource to hire a 300, 000 a year chat GPT, a prompt genius, you know, um, it's just hard. There's, you know, that's the real art of it. Again, it goes back to, do I want to spend those 8, 000 calories painting the portrait of the person or in reality to get an image?

made by MidJourney, it's going to take about 7, 500 calories of prompting it and doing it and over and over and then paying them the monthly fee and hitting a limit and waiting. So I, then I get it. Well, why not just spend those 8, 000 calories doing it? You know, in a sense, that's where I feel like we are right now.

Again, like you said, It's it could be it's gonna be totally different I think there's gonna be a whole bunch of tools that spring up around it that help, you know I think if in another thing is how process driven are you right? if if you're very if you have this step then this step then this step and you could clearly Repeat all those things.

Those things can be condensed if you've almost everything of your but like how is AI? Here's another thing. How is AI gonna replace you in all the meetings? You have to sit in boy I know my clients would miss dearly Speaking and seeing me like in corporate culture. It is meetings. Yeah, it's all meetings, right?

Is that going away or meetings going away? I think that People try to take meetings away, but then I don't know. What are the results of that? You know, the, the AI tool that is the supreme AI tool for meetings is Fathom. Yeah. That is the greatest tool. And that is where an example of AI is wonderful because I don't, I've used to struggle with meeting cadence.

As I run a lot of meetings, you do too, the having AI on board and transcribing and keeping track of everything that's going on and giving me quick little buttons to mark parts of the conversation during the conversation. That's incredible. That is a huge, but again, what is that for? It's for analysis.

It's another analysis tool that I can go back to or refer to clients. Anybody on our team can go back into that and see a record of it. Not just a recording, but also just read summaries. And that's fine. That's what it's, that's where AI is really showing its strength right now is doing that analysis piece.

Again, you got to double check it and I'm never send just copy and paste a summary out of any AI tool and a meeting and send that off to a client as like, here's the gospel. There's pretty good chance that it's pretty close, but I do want to put eyes on it and make sure that it did. You know, sometimes it misses who said what and you're like, Whoa, the, she didn't say that or he said that or something like that.

So it's, it's like having your own, um, court stenographer in every meeting, right? Yes. Yeah. Without all the clickety clack. Yeah. It's a wonderful, great tool. Yeah. Yeah, it is. But I think when I look at other AI tools that are out there, um, You know, and it's funny when you look at videos or other resources to, to do more research around this stuff.

So much of the efficiencies that are built into the audit, these things are the automation part of it. And those have been around forever. So I don't really look at those as like AI's as much as just automation things. The generative AI stuff that's out there is still just not, you know, I'm not worried.

At this point, you need people. Like you said, you got to connect with people. That's how, you know, we, we work in a business. It's a lot about relationships and just building trust with people. And it's pretty hard to build trust with a robot. And I, I mean, there's, I think there's some false starts to chat bots that are on websites, right?

Like a lot of them are just so dang frustrating because they were trying to. fit. They weren't AI driven. They were like, they were, okay, let's think about the common questions that people have. Let's give it, let's give them some answers. And very rarely did they give you the answer you want. So you're still, you're like, you've got this.

I think they've maybe almost did a disservice is what I'm getting at like to to what what could be that prior Thing might have turned some people off to where when they if they see that little chat bot help thing in the bottom Right corner. I don't look at them anymore unless i'm borderline desperate because I can't find contact information anywhere else Again, it comes down to what's the nuance of the thing you're trying to solve with the chat bot I think i've had success when it's been pretty simple things that I can't find on a complicated website You So there's already problems there, like fix the website maybe.

So you don't have to have a chat bot. Like that's part of what I think that's part of what people react to on a chat bot. Not only are the answers canned, sometimes that's okay though. Like, where do I find this? Or can you give me this form or can you just, you know, change this thing in my record, you know, please do that.

But if it's nuanced or you got a much more problem, you know, complex problem that maybe has two or three pieces to it, you're never going to have success out of that. And you're right that the reputation of those is not great. And that's unfortunate is that a lot of companies just rolled it out. And never really got, you know, they're always asking you for feedback, which I'm sure nobody really fills out.

Uh, how was your answer? Terrible. Okay, great. Do I see improvements year on year? No. You've done nothing with the data I've given you. I will tell you again, it's terrible. Terrible, terrible, terrible. And we're still in the same place. People, right? People. All right. Well, let's sum this up. I think, you know, overall, our perspective is cautious optimism.

Is that the theme? Yeah. Can we say, yeah, that's, that's where I'm at today. So, I mean, there are things that are really important that AI is working on. I would say the generative side of AI is exciting for sure, but it's nowhere near primetime where you can just automate stuff and just have the robots making art and design and, you know, Writing all of your copy for you.

There's great tools there that enable. Efficient progress on those things. Another example I could think of is like just brainstorming, you know, nothing ready for prime time. Again, it's really preliminarily the work you do to kind of think through things. I think that AI helps you look at many perspectives and kind of put more data into your brain quicker, and that's a good thing for you to do, use it for a, you could use it to do quick mock ups of things.

If you wanted to use imagery, I mean, we used to do storyboards where we would just do. Sketches of stick people, maybe you can elevate that a little bit more by using mid journey. But again, you can't, it would take you longer to prompt some of those things. If you've got a hundred images to use for a storyboard, that's going to take a lot of time.

Maybe just a sketch, you know, is going to be a lot better and quicker for that. So, uh, those are just some more examples of how AI can make your life a lot easier, but by no means is it a chance for you to just check out. I think, yeah, I think, uh, again, I, I am to this idea of that we're not anywhere close to AI being ready to deliver things for you.

Mm-Hmm. without a critical eye on, on them. So, but we'll save time in some places where maybe we're spending too much time. Um, yeah, it definitely will. It is already for a lot of people, you know, and I think um, I think when you're in part of bigger Organizations and you've got bigger teams There's probably a little bit more time didn't spend time investing in some of these tools and everything like that But if you're if you're by yourself trying to get a bunch of stuff done finding time to do all that stuff is gonna take some Time I think with everything I I think you can take a vacation.

You will be able to check out that beach Awesome. So you're saying there's a chance You There's a chance. Hold on a minute. This is gonna be great.

Well, I think that's probably a good point to end this podcast, Mike. It's been a pleasure. Thank you so much. I know I gave you a hard time earlier, but I think this is a look you can start working on cultivating. I think it's good. I don't know about that. There's a few people I need to check in with before I do that.

But thank you for the permission. I'll let people know. Thanks. Yeah. That was great. Thank you

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